day one, lands end hill climb, Grand Junction Colorado

Work in the pits can go on late at night, and start early in the morning. Racing vehicles are very fragile and are an endless "work in progress"

It was a busy day today, lots of things happening starting at 7 o'clock in the morning with a drivers meeting in the pits and the racing going on till late afternoon.

There's really no breaks in the racing once it starts other than the 15 minutes or so that it takes all of the race vehicles to come back down the mountain and into the the lower pits. Or if there's a crash the racing stops while a tow truck drags a race car off the road, unless it's already off the road, and around here you can get pretty far off the road especially if a tree doesn't stop you.

So I had to do a lot of walking today and it was usually uphill or down but that's part of the fun of this kind of racing, your not kept behind a fence, in fact there are no fences, you walk around in the pits with the cars, and you can stand at the starting line near the cars and as long as you're not a danger to yourself or others you can talk to the pit crews, talk to the drivers, and only be a few feet from them as they're leaving the starting line. It's really a laid-back fun kind of racing.

I think I mentioned before that they're not racing each other on the hill climb, their timed as they try to get to the top of the hill the fastest, so the cars start a couple of minutes behind each other so there's no contact on these narrow dirt roads with steep drop-offs.

                           theboondork

Granddad and Granddaughter, Dads here to. I told you hill climb was a family thing.

One of the racers just starting his run up the hill. There's three or four other cars already on the hill running to the top, you can spot them by the dust on the side of the hill. Just being around these guys and gals that drive these cars it's hard to tell how brave they are until you drive up that hill and see the drop-offs.

These two young folks are a married couple that are experiencing their first hill climb together. The guy had enough talent to custom-built his motorcycle and its really a unique machine, of course I'm very partial to motorcycles.

Some of the fastest cars are small cars with big engines. But in the end it comes down to the driver's skill and nerve

Getting ready to leave the pits. Will they return? Maybe.... Maybe not.